The team shipped a small feature in an iterative release of Jadu Continuum XFP - the Digital Forms solution by Jadu and it's what we in the team call a 'Butterflies and Hurricanes' moment.

So now users within organisations using Jadu Continuum XFP or Jadu Continuum Content Portal can embed forms they make into any webpage. That alone isn't all that incredible, but you can also completely style and brand those forms too. You can even embed payment enabled forms if your payment provider allows it and embed a secure form (over https) into any website that is also under https.

The steep and thorny way?

Ever since Jadu went 100% Agile a few years ago and changed our release process to continuous delivery - removing huge upgrades forever, we've been able to make radical changes in our software and deliver them to customers in a much shorter timeframe (as often as every two weeks). That means our customers get to use new features quicker and get value faster.

It took us over a year to change our culture, process and software to move to continuous release. Aside from the huge organisational change and financial investment, there has also been a fairly steep business learning curve. We essentially moved from over a decade of established process in software engineering to a new paradigm in working Agile.

Now that we are approaching a full year of continuous upgrades, we have started asking our customers for feedback. Initially, much of that has been about getting release notes and new feature updates more regularly, so we introduced a notifications feature in the platform.

Introducing Jadu University

Another significant change users requested was more in-line help and tutorials - and we are actively working on this. We are also launching a new 'Jadu University' beta platform launching in a few weeks - including video and text based professional courses users can take to enhance their learning.We've started with CMS publishing courses and we'll be iterating this with coverage over the whole platform to enable a complete set of remote learning tools.

Jadu University launches in a few weeks

The $64,000 question

I was visiting with a customer recently and we were talking about Continuum updates being frequent. They gave us valuable feedback on how they were finding the application of updates.

Some of our customers do not have technical resources to apply updates themselves - whereas some have in-house developers and system admins who prefer to do it all internally. Based on feedback, we have been working through improving the developer experience - making it nicer and easier for developers as well as non-technical users. We're planning a new install routine that helps developers install the software and create test environments.

I asked our customer if, given the opportunity, they would prefer us to go back to the old fashioned large upgrades once or twice a year, to which they said a clear: "No, we love the innovation and prefer to work with you to smooth the process".

That's a huge endorsement and appreciation for the complexity of this sort of change. We're 100% focused on making sure we constantly improve, however hard it is.